I've been trying to use this year's #adventofcode to learn Zig.

It has been an interesting experience so far. It's nice to work with a lower level language once in a while, and Zig does have some very exciting ideas, such as nice safety features along with it being very easy to ensure some properties about the memory allocations (e.g. no heap allocations).

However, I would lie if I said that I enjoyed the experience. I think the project has a bright future, but the ergonomics are lacking a bit, which is to be expected for a young and less mainstream language (namely regarding documentation, stdlib and compiler error messages).

Maybe some things are just not possible to do but, for example, using iterators in Zig really makes me miss Scala iterators. String parsing has also been a huge pain point.

It's not awful by any means, but personally I would be happy to see Scala Native competing with Zig in performance, so that I could use that instead (biased opinion, I know ).